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Meet Toronto's little poet man

By Daniel DaleSTAFF REPORTER

Sun., June 7, 2009

Mustafa Ahmed wears sneakers, jeans and T-shirts. He has close-cropped hair and a gap-toothed grin. He is 12. People tend to give him standing ovations.

He writes poems about poverty in Africa, where his family is from, and poverty in Regent Park, where he has lived his entire life. He writes poems about the value of education and the importance of trust. He writes poems that make white adults cry – this is what happened at the Hot Docs film festival – and other black students jump to their feet and clap.

Mustafa Ahmed, 12, writes poems about the value of education and the importance of trust. When he delivers his poems at spoken word performances, white adults in the audience cry and black students jump to their feet and clap. Why? He's a prodigy at empathy. (TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR)

That is what happened at a Nelson Mandela Park Public School assembly in the fall. Mustafa, who specializes in spoken word, performed "A Single Rose," a pleading poem about life in Canada's largest housing project. Students stood and cheered. Teachers gaped.

But then, back in class, she decided she had to make sure. "I didn't want to look like an idiot," she would explain later.

"She just said, 'Are you sure you wrote it? Are you sure?' " Mustafa says. "I said, 'I'll write one right now.' And I wrote one during the period. It was called 'Sick and Tired.' I remember the beginning. It was:I'm sick and tired'Too fat,' 'too skinny'Look into the TV, andThat's the definition of beauty?"

Malcolm had no further questions.

MUSTAFA SITS IN the public library just outside Regent Park. He has a soft voice and a distant gaze. When he is making a serious point, his brow furrows.

He goes to mosque. He is popular, and he likes to play basketball and sing R&B. He also likes rhetorical questions, metaphors and similes. "The thesaurus is my best friend," he says. "It's always there."

It takes a village to raise a poet. Mustafa, an honour student, is encouraged and ferried about by teachers Malcolm and Elizabeth Schaeffer. Accomplished spoken word artists, some of whom call him Little Poet Man, have given him advice. His father, Ahmed, a Muslim social worker, has heightened his awareness of societal ills.

And he has been heavily influenced and inimitably mentored – encouraged, comforted, disciplined, mocked for occasionally nonsensical rhymes, castigated for any hint of a growing ego – by his sister, Namarig, 23, a Ryerson nursing graduate who runs a leadership program for Muslim young people.

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Namarig inadvertently turned Mustafa into a poet three years ago. Searching for a way to get him to behave in school, she turned to verse.

"I was like, 'How do I talk to him? How do I make him understand that there's some things he's doing that will have huge implications for him when he gets older?' So I wrote him a poem, just me talking to him – and he replied back in poetry," she says. "We ended up having this poetry battle back and forth. And he kept going with it, and he's taken it to a whole new level."

Though his RhymeZone.com-augmented vocabulary is large, his wordplay clever, he is not quite yet a linguistic wizard. His chief gift is a preternatural understanding of the world. Like Craig Kielburger, who founded Free the Children at 12, he is a prodigy at empathy.

He has written poems about a teary woman on a bus, about the people of poor countries, about violence against women. He writes because he has to: words come to him at all hours, in all situations, begging to be rapidly recorded, rhymed, rehearsed.

"Sometimes," he says, "I feel like I have to get home, fast, and have to write, before I forget the thought."

He has performed at assemblies, at high schools and at university student events. In May, his commanding performance of "A Single Rose" at a Hot Docs screening of Invisible City, a documentary about Regent Park, received a rapturous standing ovation.

Oscar-nominated director Hubert Davis invited him to appear at Hot Docs after hearing the poem at a screening at Mandela.

"I thought it was so insightful," Davis says. "And it felt really raw, and honest. ... Being so young – it was very moving, seeing him there speaking from his heart, very talented, so eloquent."

One of six children from a devout family that emigrated from Sudan in 1992, Ahmed has, unlike older siblings, never had to eat only one meal a day. He has two parents at home. But he has not escaped the problems that have long plagued Regent Park.

To watch him on stage, captivating as he projects and gestures, is to be touched by conflicting emotions: happiness at his talents, sadness that a Toronto 12-year-old is writing about what he is writing about: "living in the ghetto, living in poverty, living in an area where people think nothing good comes out, an area they say has no potential, that's so corrupted."

One of his friends has told him he might deal drugs. One of his poems laments the troubles of his older brother. Though he loves his community, he lives among the deprived, the typecast, the victimized.

"I don't think people really understand," he says. "That's one of the reasons I do write. So they can understand, they can know, they can learn. The real reason to do poetry is so they can hear my voice."

Davis and Mustafa's teachers believe his message can make an impact. Namarig is more skeptical.

The qualities that makes him special, she says, also prevent admirers from truly hearing him.

"I think it's just, 'Oh, wow, a 12-year-old kid. Who can write. From Regent Park.' I don't really know if they hear what he's saying. I can definitely say that they see him and hear how he's saying it, but I doubt they hear the words he's saying."

The poet himself thinks his message might be strengthened, not weakened, by his age. Still, he is weary of being a novelty simultaneously applauded and ignored. In "A Single Rose," he writes:"I used to be 7And last year I was 11And I'm hoping that with the increase in ageEars that actually listen surround me as I stand on the stage."

He thinks he wants to grow up to be a psychologist or a scientist. He knows he wants to grow up to be a better spoken word artist.

For now, he is content to be a 12-year-old with a request for you.

My strategy is to reach out to anyone's handAt least letting them know that I'm willing to understand. What's yours?Remember, last year I was 11, and I'm not 7.

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